On Monday, April 19, 2010 Yanlei Diao, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst visited our group and gave a talk.

Addressing New Challenges in Data Stream Processing

Abstract: Data stream processing has found application in many areas including environmental monitoring, object tracking and monitoring, network monitoring, and business analytics. While the foundation for data stream processing has been developed in previous work, recent real-world deployments are raising a host of new challenges.

The first challenge that we address regards uncertain data streams, where data can be incomplete, imprecise, and even misleading. Feeding such data streams to existing stream systems produces results of unknown quality. In the main part of the talk, I present the design of a data stream system that captures data uncertainty from data collection to query processing to final result generation, with a focus on its data model and processing algorithms for complex relational operators. Other challenges to data stream systems include the need to extend the data model from set-based to sequence-based and the need to archive and index data streams to answer continuous queries. In the rest of the talk, I survey two other projects that address these challenges.

Bio: Yanlei Diao is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests are in information architectures and data management systems, with a focus on data streams, uncertain data management, flash memory databases, and large-scale data analysis. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, her M.S. in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2000, and her B.S. in Computer Science from Fudan University in China in 1998.

Yanlei Diao is a recipient of the NSF Career Award and finalist for the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship. She spoke at the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series at the University of Texas at Austin in December 2005. Her PhD dissertation "Query Processing for Large-Scale XML Message Brokering" won the 2006 ACM-SIGMOD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. She has served on the program committees for many international conferences and on the organization committees for SIGMOD and DMSN. She is a main contributor to YFilter 1.0, a high-performance filtering system over XML message streams.